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An Evening with Auguste Orts #5

The fifth installment of An Evening with Auguste Orts takes place in the afternoon inside the Orts office. It’s the first in a series of small-scale events informally focusing on topics related to the Orts members’ art practice. While our regular Orts Evenings concentrate on the presentation of screen and/or audio works, this new series favours discourse, dialogue and encounter.

The programme includes an in-depth presentation leading up to a lengthy conversation with the audience members and is rounded off by a short film screening. Our guest is Dan Kidner, British researcher and director of City Projects, London. He writes regularly for contemporary art magazines including Untitled, Frieze and Exit Express, and has recently worked with artists Nils Norman, Graham Fagen, Mark & Stephen Beasley, and Knut Åsdam.

Under the title ‘The surge that sets the thoughts in motion’, Dan Kidner’s talk will look closely at two films: Harun Farocki’s Images of the World and the Inscription of War (1989), and Yvonne Rainer’s Journeys from Berlin/1971 (1980). Made at either end of the 1980s, the two films have much in common. They both seem to suggest a possibility for film that went unrealised, and both, in different ways, mourn in advance that lost possibility. They both have history on their minds, and formally they are similar too, utilising similar techniques to disrupt narrative and set “thoughts in motion”.

It is this setting of thoughts in motion that Kidner wants to look at in detail. What kind of thinking is required of these films? And if these are “political films”, or rather, if the artists were politically motivated to make these films, what kind of politics is being demonstrated or expressed? Kidner will argue that rather than the films merely elaborating political ideas, or critically exploring a subject, they are creating a space in which the viewer is able to think for him or herself.

Yvonne Rainer. Journeys from Berlin/1971 (1980)
Writing credits: Jon Else, Wolfgang Senn, Michael Steinke, Shinkichi Tajiri, Carl Teitelbaum
With a.o. Vito Acconci, Annette Michelson, Gabor Vernon, Chad Wollen, Antonio Skarmeta,…

Harun Farocki. Images of the World and the Inscription of War (1989)
Writer Harun Farocki
With Ulrike Grote (narrator)